That's a line from his piece last year that debunked the idea of making a
hard-sell saturated video "go viral." If you want your brand to reach people—like P&G's amazing Olympics ad from last summer did—you need their interest in mind. But while emotional intelligence is a part of "going viral," the mechanics of the share remains a mystery, as Quartz the appropriately named writer Christopher Mimsexplains.

In a post heavy with thoughts and humor, Mims explains that when we're talking about how content moves on the web we're talking about memes. And not simply the stuff of the Reddit frontpage, but a "meme" as it came into existence: Richard Dawkins, the rabble-rousing evolutionary biologist, coined it in 1976 as a way to describe how ideas are like genes—reproducing by moving from one mind to another, mutating while they're there, and spreading, spreading, spreading into society.

The Internet, of course, makes it happen way faster.

Mims mentions a confounding study by Michele Coscia, a Harvard researcher who tracked 178,801 variants of 499 memes (via Quickmeme!). About 35% of them were successful—with an interesting pattern, as Mims describes:

"Those that hit an above-average peak of popularity at some point in their life were less likely, overall, to ultimately break the "success" threshold. Memes that were shared more consistently over time, rather than a great deal all at once, were more likely to ultimately rack up enough points."

In other words, the most successful memes (and we can responsibly generalize that to content as a whole) have a certain evergreen quality to them. This has also been confirmed by Bitly data scientist Hilary Mason, whose link-fueled data set acts an index of the Internet's attention: the most enduringly shared articles have a more timeless than timely quality to them, she once told me in an interview, which presents an interesting dilemma to companies in the business of news.

Using a term that media manipulator Ryan Holiday is fond of, the internet's economy is one of attention: meaning that there's a finite pool of attention to go around, so if one meme (be it LOLcat or thinkpiece) gains in popularity, others will fall.

This underscores the social part of social networks, social news, or social whatever. When we say social, we really mean people. And while people are great, they (for better or worse) hate to feel bored. Publishers know this, as revealed by the way Jonah Peretti built BuzzFeed to be the place you'll default to when you're bored at work.

So humans are emotional and easily bored. And as Sims notes, we're also mightily predictable.

"Past research about memes shows two things that should surprise no one, but are worth emphasizing: If you can figure out what someone is interested in, you can predict how likely she is to share a piece of content. And the more similar a piece of content is to what she has shared before, the more likely she is to share it."

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Here is what passed the test of time for me. I saw it and learned it in the 40's, and it's still valid today. I call it the full circle of success: Common Vision, Common Purpose, Common Goals. We learned how to collaborate and succeed as a nation of individuals and where we are not succeeding today it is because we are fractured into parties divided by ideology. Where we are succeeding there is a high degree of cooperation and sharing of values.

Recognizing isn't the same as understanding though. I think that's an important distinction to keep in mind, especially if trying to create shareable content. The most successful memes are made by...those driven to make memes. That's really how it happens. People who create on their own time, from their own deep drive to make something that connects and spreads, is what brings the most important quality to it. It's an invisible part that won't appear in an article. It's a way of operating and not just a one-time brief. Marketers can study the process and effects, but if somebody's not already acting on their creative urges and impluses naturally, or they're not personally drawn into the media their creations would live in, then while they may be able to analysis and deduce the whys or hows, they'll never really understand the whys or the hows. It's like any form of emotion-based creative communication. There's a real science, but the gold always comes from the gut.